


Infinite Probability Ratios

by adjovi



Category: The Magicians (TV)
Genre: F/M, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-01
Updated: 2018-06-01
Packaged: 2019-05-16 17:13:13
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,287
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14815472
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/adjovi/pseuds/adjovi
Summary: What if all the timelines came crashing into one?





	Infinite Probability Ratios

He felt a churning in his stomach he didn’t quite understand. This was…wrong. He felt it in his bones. The changes were subtle. The color of the walls were slightly different, no longer eggshell but now a very pale green. The Feng shui had flipped, the couch shoved against the wall under the staircase instead of the middle in front of the book shelves. No one else seemed to notice, just continued on studying, laughing, flirting. Life. But, he felt that something had shifted, just slightly to the side.

Margo caught his eye. “Hey. What’s your drama?” She was sprawled in the window seat, basking in the sunlight.

He moved over to sit next to her, lifting her feet and sliding them on his lap. “Does this seem…right…to you?”

She snorted. “Um, El, sweetie? You really need to lay off the whiskey before noon.”

He was sober as a judge. “Bambi, I’m serious.”

She shrugged. “So am I, babe. You drink too much.”

Just then, the door opened. Quentin and Julia could be heard talking as they walked through. “Mr. Dempsey was a bag of dicks.”

Julia swiped at Quentin’s arm. “Mr. Dempsey was _dreamy_.”

Quentin scoffed at her. “To a skinny twelve-year-old boy with no discernible athletic ability, he was a fucking _nightmare_.” He stopped suddenly, and she bumped into him from behind. He spun in a small circle, taking in the whole room. “Did someone paint in here?”

Eliot stood, displacing Margo’s feet, causing her to almost crash to the ground. “Jesus, El!”

He glanced at her, shrugging an apology, before advancing towards Quentin, grabbing him by the shoulders. “It’s wrong, right?”

Quentin scrunched his eyebrows together in confusion in a way that Eliot recognized he was trying to puzzle things out. The reaction felt so familiar to him, like he had observed it a thousand times before, which was weird, considering he barely knew Quentin. They had been fast friends, sure, but this was something else entirely. He looked up at Eliot. “I mean, you know, before they were white, but now almost…green?”

“Yes! Yes.” Eliot felt slightly less crazy now that someone else shared his delusion. He fantasized about kissing Quentin right behind his ear, nuzzling the soft fuzz of his hairline, knowing what this would do to him. Fucking certain of it. Which was completely impossible. He cleared his throat. “Something’s off, right?”

Quentin took a step back, putting some distance between them. He could tell the proximity was making Q uncomfortable, but he didn’t move very far away. “Yeah. Um, you know,” he tugged at his hair, his gaze flitting around the room until finally settling back on Eliot. “It feels like someone redecorated, or something. Like everything is a little…different.”

Margo slid off of the window seat and walked over towards them. “Are you both high?”

Julia walked over as well, regarding Quentin anxiously. “Q?”

Quentin had a faraway look in his eyes, like he was somewhere else. Unexpectedly, a flush crept up his neck and blossomed on his cheeks, and he flicked his eyes towards Eliot then quickly away, flustered. So, he felt it, too. “I just…” He shook his head as if trying to clear it. He chanced a wary look back at Eliot. “Are you doing this?”

“Me?” Eliot ran a hand through his hair, thoroughly confused. “Why would I do this?” He instinctively turned towards the couch, then remembering it had been moved, walked over to the new location and sank down.

Margo came right beside him, perching with her knees leaning against him. She looked at him with actual concern, placing a hand on his forehead. “Well, no fever.” She sniffed in his general direction. “And, you are shockingly sober.”

“Bambi, I told you…”

She made a square with the thumbs and index fingers of both hands, then twisted it to the side, looking through, first at Eliot, and then over to Quentin. She shrugged. “I don’t see any spells.”

Penny and Kady came down the stairs, her arms slung across his shoulders from behind. Eliot was flooded with simultaneous images. One of Penny with a bright green mohawk. The other of a man in robes that hung strangely from his arms. Penny was casting strong spells, somehow, even though he didn’t have any _hands_. “Dude, the fuck?”

Eliot had been caught staring. He flicked his eyes away and then back. This Penny had dark hair and two hands. “Sorry. I…sorry. Just ignore me.”

Quentin was holding a candlestick from the mantle in his hands, turning it over slowly. “This used to be an ‘evil eye’.” He was addressing Julia.

“No, Q, it was always a _fleur de lis_.” Eliot could hear the worry in her voice.

“He’s right, you know.” Eliot leaned forward, letting his hands drop between his knees. He always thought they were fucking gauche, but Margo had insisted it went with the overall shabby chic vibe so they had kept the set. The _fleur de lis_ was an improvement.

\-----

Word of the Beast’s attack had spread quickly across campus, like the viral infection that it was. Eliot was completely shook. He made a hasty retreat to his room, unable to be around the others just now. He couldn’t look at their faces after seeing them all die, one by one, in horrific, albeit creatively different ways. He hadn’t realized there were so many means of eviscerating a person. He was currently staring at the Broadway poster of “Hedwig and the Angry Inch” on his wall, absolutely certain it was supposed to be the original book cover of “The Naked Lunch”. He had grabbed a bottle of whiskey and two glasses on his way up, not at all surprised when Quentin knocked on his door a short while later.

Quentin looked like hell, eyes wide and pretty much completely unhinged. He collapsed, sitting hard on the bed next to Eliot. “Jesus Christ. I think it is _me_ that is doing this.” He peered over at Eliot. “He said _my_ name. He fucking _knew_ me.”

“What?” Eliot sighed, fighting off the image of the Beast casually cutting a slash across Quentin’s chest from shoulder to belly, Q’s eyes wide in surprise like he couldn’t believe it had happened. He could _hear_ the squishy sound of mud as Quentin dropped to his knees. Eliot blinked a few times rapidly to clear his head. “I’m pretty sure this isn’t you, Q.”

He took a sip of his whiskey to calm himself, immediately realizing there was something very off about the way that it tasted. Like someone had approximated what whiskey should look like, and smell like, but just winged it on taste and completely missed the mark. He held up the bottle, studying it, not noticing anything amiss. He poured a glass for Quentin. “Here. Taste this.”

Quentin took a tentative sip, licking his lips. He cocked his head to the side and regarded the glass strangely. “It tastes like…red Kool-Aid.”

Eliot just hoped it still did the fucking job.

Quentin stood. “God. It's so strange. It is like there are all these different versions of people, you know? Liked stacked up on top of each other.” He mimed stacking with his hands in the air, before he started anxiously pacing the room.

Eliot nodded in response. “Exactly like that.”

“Take Alice, for example.” He was tugging at his hair again. “Like sometimes, I see myself with her.” He sighed. “But it never lasts.” He looked at Eliot. “Sometimes the Beast comes between us. One time _I_ was the Beast that killed her. Once, she went fucking _niffin._ ” Quentin’s hands were balled into fists so tightly that his knuckles were white. Eliot knew he was about to have a front row seat to freak out level: Quentin.

His mind went to a completely different place where he saw Alice and Quentin returning from Brakebills South, all nervous and awkward in the way that he knew they had finally gotten over themselves and banged the shit out of each other.

Quentin glanced over at him. “Sometimes, it's you and Margo that breaks us up. And, sometimes, it’s just you.” A blush crept onto his face again, unbidden.

“Is it because I'm a _guy_ that you are so freaked out?” Eliot tried not to be too bothered by this—Quentin would hardly be the first to go all gay panic on him.

He stopped mid-pace and snorted, momentarily placated that the bottled tension he had been carrying around had a release. “Don’t flatter yourself. You’re not my first rodeo. There’s plenty more for me to be freaking out about right now.”

Eliot grinned at him. “Well, I seem to remember thinking with disco moves like that...” He stopped abruptly as something occurred to him just then, shifting everything into clearer focus. “Holy shit, Q. That’s what this is.” He looked up at Quentin. “These different versions of people…these are memories!”

“Of what?” Quentin dropped heavily onto the bed again.

Suddenly, he was flooded with dozens of memories of Quentin. _Hundreds_. Of how he smelled after a day of working the mosaic in the sun, all musk and salt and smoke. Lazy mornings spent fucking, Quentin riding his cock almost painfully slowly, trying not to rush and just savoring how fucking good it felt, nowhere they needed to be. Of fighting over something stupid, like Quentin’s shitty system of putting dishes away, wanting to haul off and punch him in the face and instead hauling him into a rough kiss, thigh pressed into Q’s dick, already half-hard, releasing frustration in a different way altogether. He was turned away from Quentin, breathless, and he could tell by the way Quentin was audibly breathing that he was right there with him.

The atmosphere in the room shifted then, almost with a perceptible pop. Quentin gasped softly. “Oh.” When Eliot turned towards him then, Q looking like he almost might cry, his gut filled with lead. “Oh, Eliot.” Quentin’s voice was barely a whisper. He grasped his hands, rubbing circles into his palms with his thumbs. “I’m so sorry.” He took in another deep, shaky breath. “It’s close.”

Eliot looked around frantically. “The Beast?”

Quentin looked so very, very sad. “No, Eliot. _Shit_. I know what's happening. I understand now.” He reached forward almost clumsily, pulling Eliot into an urgent kiss, then released him and looked him full in the face. “It made me your anchor.”

Eliot just shook his head, still muzzy from the kiss. “My anchor?”

Quentin sighed again. “It knew if it tried to bring it all back at once, it would be too much. It would have _broken_ you. Too many timelines. Too many fucking memories. So it had me guide you.”

“I don’t…”

“I know.” He looked around anxiously. “Shit. It’s almost done.” He shook Eliot’s hands, in a way that he could tell he was willing him to understand. “Just remember that no matter what happens, I love you very…”

He froze mid-sentence, like someone had suddenly turned the sound down on the world and everything was sliding to a stop. Eliot was frozen as well, just stuck staring at Quentin. There was a whirly sound like wind blowing and the room filled with snowflakes. Or maybe not actual snow, because he wasn’t cold, but maybe that had to do with the whole frozen thing. Seconds later, the snow was swirling around so thick that he couldn’t even see Quentin anymore. Then, he felt like he was falling. He idly wondered if this was what it would have felt like if the Muntjac had tipped over the edge instead of soaring.

He remembered the first time he saw Margo. She was the most beautiful creature he had ever seen in real life. Then he met her and realized she could not be ascribed to something as pedestrian as mere beauty.

He remembered the first time he saw Quentin, impossibly pretty. He quickly understood Quentin actually had no idea, like the people in his life had up to this point simply forgotten to clue him into this fact.

He fell for what seemed forever before slamming into something which immediately yielded in a sickening way, like landing in Jell-O. He blinked a few times, gaining his bearings. He felt something moving his head from side to side, and he gazed around, taking in a dingy apartment he did not recognize. It was a bizarre sensation, like he was not in control. He felt his mouth form a smile he did not make. “There! All fixed!”

 _I didn’t realize I was broken._ His mouth didn’t form these words. Holy. Shit. Holy fucking shit. He began to fathom the depths of how truly fucked he was.

He bizarrely recalled that crappy Ryan Reynolds movie that Margo made him sit through that one time because she was sure Eliot would find him hot. The film had the exact opposite effect. Essentially, the entire plot centered on this guy being trapped inside a coffin buried in the sand in some deserty war zone, as the audience watched him slowly go mad and suffocate inside his own grave. Eliot began to grasp that his own coffin was body shaped. His first instinct was the same as the man in the movie, shouting and banging against the sides, although this seemed to have no effect on his current co-host.

“It’s going to be ok now, Eliot.” It walked itself over to the bathroom mirror, and Eliot knew it wanted him to _see_ itself. It smiled broadly at him. “It’s going to be ok. This time, we’re going to find him for real.”

Eliot _screamed_.

**Author's Note:**

> IDK where this came from, although I think inspired from so many excellent fics for the last Welter's theme of timelines. I still can't figure out how to post there since I am a luddite. :) Thanks for any comments or kudos!


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